WITH woeful dialogue and poor performances, the Princess of Wales biopic covering the last two years of her life fails to deliver on all counts.

DIRECTOR Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Diana biopic was always going to be treading a minefield, owing to the passionate strength of feeling that still exists about the people’s princess and the ongoing controversies surrounding her death.

But few could have predicted just how badly the ensuing film would get it wrong.

Diana aims to offer a compelling portrait of the Princess of Wales during the final two years of her life, focusing on her love affair with British-born Pakistani heart surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan and how it gave her life and humanitarian work new meaning and vitality.

But, rather than offering anything probing to rival the contradictions and complexities unearthed by Martin Bashir in that now infamous Panorama interview, which is recreated faithfully in one of the film’s few highlights, it’s more content to offer a sappy and imagined look at that romance.

When not serving up laughable scenarios of the rom-com variety, it’s delivering risible dialogue on the meaning of love as supplied by Steven Jeffreys’s turgid script.

The performances flounder as a result. Naomi Watts fails to convince as Diana, coming across as too reverential during the serious moments, without bringing any sense of character or personality.

She struggles with the cheesy dialogue during the supposedly intimate behind-the-scenes stuff, a lot of which has been inspired by Kate Snell’s book Diana: Her Last Love.

Naveen Andrews, similarly, can do little with his own woeful dialogue and lacks any chemistry with Watts.